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Star Wars: A reality
check
By Tom Engelhardt
Last week, just as Star Wars: Revenge
of the Sith was opening galaxy-wide, Tim
Weiner revealed on the front page of the New York
Times that a new presidential directive issued by
the George W Bush administration will soon
essentially green-light the future US
militarization of space. (When, in December 2001,
the administration withdrew from the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbade the
weaponization of space, it opened the way for
exactly the kind of Pentagon research and
development that now threatens to come to mutant
fruition in the heavens.)
Just three days
before Weiner's piece appeared, military analyst
William Arkin reported in the Washington Post that
"early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H
Rumsfeld approved a top secret 'Interim Global
Strike Alert Order'," preparing the way for
devastating attacks against hostile powers
developing weapons of mass destruction, air
strikes that could be carried out more or less on
demand anywhere on the planet and, if so desired,
included a "nuclear option".
These two
actions don't represent separate worlds of
planning. One of the imagined future weapons for
Rumsfeld's "global strike" force, for instance,
turns out to be a CAV (common aero vehicle) that,
from space, could theoretically hit any target on
Earth with a massive dose of conventional
munitions on half an hour's notice. Of this
weapon, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus wrote,
"The first-generation CAV, expected to be ready by
2010, will have 'an incredible capability to
provide the warfighter with a global reach
capability against high payoff targets', General
Lance W Lord, commander of Air Force Space
Command, told the House Armed Services Committee
... The system could, Lord said, 'deliver a
conventional payload precisely on target within
minutes of a valid command and control release
order'."
Such "global strike" space
weaponry, while not (yet) nuclearized, would not
be far off in impact. For instance, according to
Weiner, one such weapon, Hypervelocity Rod Bundles
(nicknamed "Rods from God"), aims "to hurl
cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from
the edge of space to destroy targets on the
ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles
[11,590 kilometers] an hour with the force of a
small nuclear weapon". In this way, the boundaries
between the previously almost unusable nuclear
option and more conventional war-fighting options
are slowly - and quite consciously - being blurred
by the Bush administration.
Let's put a
label on these developments: proliferation. In
space, as on Earth, Bush strategists have an
almost primal urge to cross strategic and weapons
barriers and thresholds of all sorts and head into
uncharted territory; or, as an old TV space opera
used to put it, "boldly go where no man has gone
before". (On Star Trek, though, the voyages
of the USS Enterprise were, at least
theoretically, peaceful in nature, and the
announcement of the next destination didn't
automatically end with an explosion.)
Perhaps there's another label that might
capture even better the administration's primal
global urge - in this case, a label much beloved
by the Air Force Space Command, those "Guardians
of the High Frontier" (as they so flatteringly
like to call themselves): "dominance" or "space
superiority". ("Space superiority is not our
birthright, but it is our destiny," Space
Command's General Lord told an Air Force
conference in September. "Space superiority is our
day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision
for the future.") In the old Army Air Corps
anthem, airmen sang of taking off "into the wild
blue yonder, climbing high into the sun"; now I
suppose it should be "the wild, black yonder".
There has been much online controversy
lately about whether the new Star Wars movie is an
attack on the Bush administration. One thing can
certainly be said: where Star Wars went long ago,
Bush administration fantasies are now heading.
After all, what is a CAV but a little "Death
Star", that terrible, planet-destroying instrument
of the on-screen Evil Empire. As Theresa Hitchens
of the Center for Defense Information pointed out
in a recent article, "[O]rbiting 'death stars' to
attack ground targets are being considered. Pete
Teets, the former acting secretary of the US Air
Force has said: 'We haven't reached the point of
strafing and bombing from space - nonetheless, we
are thinking about those possibilities'."
In fact, "thinking" turns out to be
something of a euphemism, given that the first
tests of parts of the CAV program are to be
carried out later this year. Of course, the Bush
high-frontiersmen and the high-frontiersmen of the
military-industrial complex (into which so many
space-based tax dollars are already flowing) are
just dying to test new generations of
threshold-busting weapons (can't wait!). And yet,
most of these bizarre weapons are technologically
daunting and deficit-bustingly expensive. As
Weiner pointed out: "Richard Garwin, widely
regarded as a dean of American weapons' science,
and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of
IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of
electric engineering, that 'a space-based laser
would cost $100 million per target, compared with
$600,000 for a Tomahawk missile.'"
In
addition, based on past history, such futuristic
dream-weaponry is likely to be about as successful
as our $100 billion (so far) Star Wars
anti-missile system, which has proved incapable of
intercepting anything smaller than the Queen Mary
or faster than a tractor; and - irony of ironies -
the decision to test, and then try to deploy, such
systems is likely not only to start a space-arms
race, but to make us all (and the satellites we
now depend on for so much) far more vulnerable
than at present. According to Demetri Sevastopulo
of the British Financial Times, the Russian answer
to the news in the New York Times piece was
instantaneous and grim: "Russia would consider
using force if necessary to respond if the US put
a combat weapon into space, according to a senior
Russian official."
Space domination -
meaning war-fighting in space - is a form of
Earthly madness. But the path of proliferation,
once started down, has its own mad logic. Bush's
top officials have been stuck on global dominance
since they took power. Dominance has just turned
out to be a little harder to come by on Earth than
advertised. But, ah, space - all those boys who
grew up on science-fiction movies and moon shots
now have their moment. And a boy can always dream,
can't he?
The only problem is that Bush's
dreamers, having swallowed their
inside-the-beltway global-power fantasies whole,
turn out to play the dominance game like the
global klutzes they are. Admittedly, they've been
in their Darth Vader outfits breathing hard for
quite a while - every day another threat (and if
John Bolton makes it to the United Nations, change
that to a threat a second) - but they seem to lack
the power effectively to demand a pizza delivery
for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
None of this
makes what they're doing any less dangerous: the
new "global strike" plans revealed by military
analyst Arkin represent part of a revolution in
what passes for nuclear policymaking in the United
States.
So, proliferation planet? Sure,
that's on the way. Now, though, we're intent on
proliferating in the heavens as on Earth. Think of
it as a package deal.
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the
mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The
End of Victory Culture, a history of American
triumphalism in the Cold War.
(Copyright 2005 TomDisptach.com)
(Published with permission of TomDisptach.com) |
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